[LINK] RFI: Telstra DNS outage

[Roger Clarke]

At 13:27 +1200 13/5/16, Juha Saarinen wrote:
>Have some official comment from Telstra now:
><http://www.itnews.com.au/news/telstra-dns-outage-causes-customer-grief-419496>http://www.itnews.com.au/news/telstra-dns-outage-causes-customer-grief-419496

>Update A Telstra spokesman acknowledged last night's outage and attributed it to a failure with a component that manages traffic to its two DNS servers.
>"We can confirm there was an issue with one of our DNS servers which impacted some of our corporate customers only. It was resolved in 90 minutes," the spokesperson said.
>"We isolated the component and traffic was directed to the servers."

Thanks Juha!

This suggests that the Telstra spokesman may have mis-read the DNS entries the same way I did (in order to conclude that there were "two [and only two] DNS servers").

And that the Telstra spokesman may have overlooked the use of Anycasting.

Or, alternatively, the Telstra spokesman knows what he's talking about, and there's a single-point-of-failure for the entire Telstra service, viz. "a [single] component that manages traffic to its two DNS servers".

That's consistent with 'a router' and hence with my initial presumption that the two DNS-servers are on the same sub-net.  (But there are many other possibilities, so it certainly doesn't prove my presumption to be correct).

I need to revise my critical comments to something like "it still seems like incompetence on the part of Telstra's technical staff and/or execs (e.g. if they ignored risk assessments and tech recommendations) and/or spokesman".

I remain aghast, and I think Telstra customers should be as well.


-- 
Roger Clarke                                 http://www.rogerclarke.com/
			            
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Visiting Professor in the Faculty of Law            University of N.S.W.
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